Seminar description

The Core introductory seminar is designed to introduce first year doctoral researchers to fundamental elements of historical method while integrating them into the intellectual culture of our department. The distinctiveness of this culture lies above all in our shared commitment to the comparative, transnational and global history of Europe in the world. This common commitment is expressed and realized in very diverse ways in the research pursued by the faculty researchers with whom you will be working over the next four years.

Equally important, the seminar also aims to promote a common culture of discussion and intellectual engagement among researchers who, like the EUI faculty, come from very different academic cultures. Only through dialogue and exchange can we begin to understand the concepts that underlie our particular languages of scholarship and think in rich and comparative/transnational ways about how these different research traditions can engage each other.

With these goals in mind, the seminar opens with a series of five sessions intended to introduce researchers to the Department, its fields of research and diverse approaches through concrete discussion of ongoing faculty research. The second part of the course focuses more closely on the multiple and varied sources of historical scholarship as well as their critical reading and deployment in service of a larger historical argument. By reading a small selection of exemplary texts that use a wide range of source materials, we will analyze together the manifold ways in which different kinds of archives, ego documents, oral interviews, visual evidence and material objects (to name but a few types of sources) have been deployed in historical scholarship. This, in turn, should nourish researchers’ thoughts about their own projects, and how they might develop and refine their research questions in dialogue with the sources.

Syllabus

19 October: Joint introductory session (Sala del Camino)

26 October: Professors’ presentations

Prof. Regina Grafe (11:00-12:00 Group B – 12:00-13:00 Group A): “Of Nuns, cash, and credit. A non-eurocentric history of Spanish America’s fiscal and financial history in the 18th century”

Federico Romero (2014) "Refashioning the West to dispel its fears: the early G7 summits"; in Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol and Federico Romero (eds), International summitry and global governance : the rise of the G7 and the European Council, London: Routledge, 2014, Cold War History, pp. 117-137.

Prof. Corinna Unger (11:00-12:00 Group B – 12:00-13:00 Group A): “The World Bank and Urban Development in Calcutta, 1970s and 1980s”

Reading:

Corinna R. Unger (2017), “Development Projections: The World Bank and the Modernization of Calcutta, 1970s and 1980s”. Manuscript under review.

Luca Molà (2014) "Inventors, patent and the market for innovations in renaissance Italy"; in Ian Inkster (ed.), History of technology, London ; New York : Bloomsbury academic, History of technology; 32, pp. 7-34.

Luca Molà (forthcoming) “A Silken Diplomacy. Venetian Luxury Gifts for the Ottoman Empire in the Late Renaissance.” In Giorgio Riello, Anne Gerritson and Zoltán Biedermann (eds.), Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia, Cambridge University Press.

Prof. Alexander Etkind (11:00-12:00 Group A – 12:00-13:00 Group B): "Kant’s Subaltern Period: The Birth of Cosmopolitanism from the Spirit of Occupation"

Reading:

Alexander Etkind (2017) "Kant’s Subaltern Period: The Birth of Cosmopolitanism from the Spirit of Occupation"; in Dina Guseinova (ed.), Cosmopolitanism in Conflict. Imperial Encounters from the Seven Years War to the Cold War, Palgrave.

30 November: Sources (Early Modern History in Group A, Modern History Group B)

Readings for Group A:

Thomas V. Cohen (2004), Love and Death in Renaissance Italy, University of Chicago Press, pp. 45-70.